KDL Recommends

Books to Fall in Love with this Summer

The Truth about Forever (Teen's Top 10 (Awards)) by Sarah Dessen

TEEN DESSEN

The summer following her father’s death, Macy plans to work at the library and wait for her brainy boyfriend to return from camp, but instead she goes to work at a catering business where she makes new friends and finally faces her grief.

When Samantha, the seventeen-year-old daughter of a wealthy, perfectionist, Republican state senator, falls in love with the boy next door, whose family is large, boisterous, and just making ends meet, she discovers a different way to live, but when her mother is involved in a hit-and-run accident Sam must make some difficult choices.

While in a coma following an automobile accident that killed her parents and younger brother, seventeen-year-old Mia, a gifted cellist, weighs whether to live with her grief or join her family in death.

Sixteen-year-old Hazel, a stage IV thyroid cancer patient, has accepted her terminal diagnosis until a chance meeting with a boy at cancer support group forces her to reexamine her perspective on love, loss, and life

When transfer student Jane is forced to move from the confines of Metro City to Suburbia, she thinks her life is over. But there in the lunch room at the reject table she finds her tribe: three other girls named Jane. Main Jane encourages them to form a secret art gang and paint the town P.L.A.I.N. —People Loving Art In Neighborhoods. But can art attacks really save the hell that is high school?

After the death of her father, Amy, a high school student, and Roger, a college freshman, set out on a carefully planned road trip from California to Connecticut, but wind up taking many detours, forcing Amy to face her worst fears and come to terms with her grief and guilt.

When Anna’s romance-novelist father sends her to an elite American boarding school in Paris for her senior year of high school, she reluctantly goes, and meets an amazing boy who becomes her best friend, in spite of the fact that they both want something more.

Aria and Perry, two teens from radically different societies—one highly advanced, the other primitive—hate being dependent on one another until they overcome their prejudices and fall in love, knowing they can’t stay together.

Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe (Americas Award for Children's and Young Adult Literature. Commended) by Benjamin Alire Saenz

TEEN SEANZ

Fifteen-year-old Ari Mendoza is an angry loner with a brother in prison, but when he meets Dante and they become friends, Ari starts to ask questions about himself, his parents, and his family that he has never asked before.

As a fourteen-year-old who just moved to a new town, with no friends, an abusive father and a louse for an older brother, Doug Swieteck has all the stats stacked against him until he finds an ally in Lil Spicer. Together they find a safe haven in the local library, inspiration in learning about the plates of John James Audubon’s birds and a hilarious adventure on a Broadway stage.

Two years younger than his classmates at a prestigious boarding school, fourteen-year-old Ryan Dean West grapples with living in the dorm for troublemakers, falling for his female best friend who thinks of him as just a kid, and playing wing on the Varsity rugby team with some of his frightening new dorm-mates.